This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “Science, policy, and communication with Brad Udall.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

Brad Udall: There’s a whole litany of changes that are going to occur to the water cycle, in large part because the water cycle is heat driven and, if you add heat to the planet like we’re doing right now, you fundamentally change that water cycle and we’re seeing it. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Hello and welcome to CSU’s Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University’s Spur Campus in Denver, Colorado. 

Brad Udall: I do think the public understands, hey, wow, this is a really long drought and it’s really hot out there and something’s going on but the more nuanced learning is not really there yet. 

Jocelyn Hittle: On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health, and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. I’m Jocelyn Hittle, associate vice chancellor of the CSU Spur Campus and I am joined today by Brad Udall. Brad has been a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center for over a decade. His expertise includes hydrology and related policy issues of the American West with a focus on the Colorado River. 

His work operates at the intersection of water and climate. For instance, Brad was a co-author of the 2009 and 2018 National Climate Assessments and is a contributing author to the 2014 IPCC fifth Assessment. Brad comes from a long line of water and policy focused westerners and his career has demonstrated a combination of science, policy and communication about these complicated issues. Brad has an engineering degree from Stanford and an MBA from Colorado State University. Welcome, Brad. Thanks for joining us. 

Brad Udall: Thanks, Jocelyn. Great to be here. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So, let’s dive in on what you are working on now. As a senior scientist and fellow at the Colorado Water Center, what is keeping you busy? 

Brad Udall: So, right now my focus is on the evolving, I’ll call it a train wreck although that’s probably not the right term, frankly. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Well, it’s evocative. Yup. 

Brad Udall: The evolving issues in the Colorado River basin. And basically, after 23 years of very low flows which some people call drought, I don’t, I call it aridification, long-term warming and drying. Droughts are temporary, this is not. I’m working on trying to figure out where we’re going in this system, what kind of science can be presented, how do you present it in a policy relevant format and a lot of little details. I actually spend a lot of time talking to the press trying to explain what’s going on right now in this really complicated basin that, at least to many people, it appears the wheels are coming. 

Jocelyn Hittle: And when you say the wheels are coming off, can you say more about what that means? What does it mean that we have this crisis in the Colorado River? 

Brad Udall: So, here’s what’s happened since the year 2000. The nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, have lost more than two thirds of their combined volume. They were almost full in the year 2000, they’re now about 25% full. This decline has been caused by two things, too much water use and what now appears to be a permanent decline in flows due to warming temperatures caused by human releases of greenhouse gases. And it’s hard to overstate just how important the Colorado River is, it’s half the water here on the Front Range, it’s almost all the water in the American Southwest. 

It’s 90% of the water for Las Vegas, 50% for Phoenix, arguably all of the water in Tucson, 25% of the water in Los Angeles. It actually gets out of the basin like the Front Range here but also to Albuquerque and Santa Fe and Cheyenne. It’s really hard to overstate how important this is and, when supplies go down like this and reservoirs drop to unprecedented levels, all of a sudden, it gets a lot of attention how do we make this system sustainable. So, that’s in a nutshell where we are and where we’re, well, not so much where we’re headed. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So, you speak of these two reasons that there is a crisis in the Colorado River basin which has just a vast geographic economic, cultural, social footprint. These two reasons that we have these water shortages, too much water use and less precipitation coming into the basin due to climate change. What are the policy implications of that? What are we doing to try to fix this problem? Where are we falling short? Where are we seeing some successes? 

Brad Udall: So, this drought, and I don’t like that term, I already said I don’t like it but I fell into using it, this event started in the year 2000 and, from 2000 to 2005, we basically lost half the reservoir contents. And at that point, the federal government stepped in and said, “Hey, we have no plan for dealing with low reservoirs, we have no plan for delivering less water than promised. All of you seven states, get together and figure out a plan for us or we will, we the federal government will.” And so, in 2007, we had a big plan put in place that was supposed to deal with these declining reservoirs. Post 2005, had some okay years then we had a big year in 2011, actually bigger than this year I’ll note, even though everybody’s super excited about this year, we have had big years and then we had- 

Jocelyn Hittle: Big years in terms of precipitation, you mean? They’ve been wetter than normal. 

Brad Udall: Precipitation and runoff. And then we had two disastrous years, 2012 and 2013. And finally, by 2019, we have another set of plans in place for how to deliver less water to the users. And just last year, the federal government said, “Hey, guess what? These two plans, the one from 2007 and the one from 2019, they’re not nearly enough and we need you all to come up immediately with a plan to cut 15 to 30% of water use within the next several months.” And so, this year, there have been all these processes in place, negotiations mostly amongst the lower states of Arizona, California and Nevada, about how to implement these cuts. 

There are tremendous issues with how this system has been set up in the 20th century and where we are right now and, unfortunately, I would argue that that’s what we call the law of the river is particularly ill-suited to dealing with a 21st century problem like this. And so, that’s why this basin’s been, at least for a little bit, tied in knots trying to figure out, all right, who’s going to get less water, how do we pay people for taking less, how do we respect all the economic activities that are in place including agricultural uses and cities and how do we do the least harm to everybody. 

So, that’s the process that’s in place right now, there’s what’s called a special environmental impact statement on very much a fast track. This whole process will be done in six months, which is unheard of in the water world, where typically three years to do an environmental impact statement is a standard fast track. And what we’re waiting on right now is an agreement amongst the three lower basin states as to how to share these cuts. And there’s rumors, actually, that they’ve come up with one, that the federal government’s actually not going to step in with a heavy hand, not going to have to step in with this heavy hand and implement unilateral cuts. We’ll see. 

And then, on top of this, by the year 2026, so three short years from now, we need a whole new operating regime because the current one expires in that year. And that regime’s probably got to take us out to mid-century where we think it gets a whole lot warmer, a whole lot drier and we have even less water than the 20% reduction in flows we’ve seen since the year 2000. So, it’s a pretty exciting time in the Colorado River basin to be engaged in all of these activities. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So, let me see if I can recap a little. We have seven states that are part of the Colorado River basin, the lower basin has the three states you mentioned, California, Nevada, and Arizona? Did I get that right? 

Brad Udall: Yup. 

Jocelyn Hittle: And then the upper basin states are … What are the four upper basin states? 

Brad Udall: So, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming. And that delineation of an upper basin and a lower basin goes way back to 1922 when the original Colorado River Compact was signed which divvied up the river amongst the seven states. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Right. So, the Colorado River Compact, which just had its 100-year anniversary last year, set in place who gets what among those seven states at a time when water flows might have been higher than average and obviously at a time where there were many fewer people and fewer uses of the Colorado River within those seven states. Over time, it has become clear that allocation isn’t going to work, in part because of the challenges you already mentioned and maybe in part because it wasn’t divvied up appropriately in the first place, given how much water we know is actually truly average for the Colorado River. So far so good? 

Brad Udall: Yes, absolutely. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. 

Brad Udall: You got it. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Thank you. And then, in recent years, as we have seen from 2000 to 2005, losing half the volume of those reservoirs must have been quite alarming over the course of five years. Of course, as you mentioned, we’ve had some ups and downs in terms of amount of water in them since then but there have been a series of different attempts to get the basin states to divvy the water up differently, think about cuts, think about conservation for cities, think about conservation for agriculture, think about all conservation for all of the different users. And right now we are at a place where maybe on the brink of an agreement between the lower basin states to at least fix the problem temporarily with another round of conversations necessary for 2026. Did I summarize all of that accurately? 

Brad Udall: You did. You got it 100% right. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Great. It is really complicated and, of course, you and I have had some conversations about this over the course of the several years that we have been talking about what a policy presence at the CSU Spur campus might look like. So, I can’t take credit for having absorbed it all and turned it around in real time, you and I have been talking about this for a while. 

So, speaking of that, with all of the attention that has been focused on the Colorado River basin in recent years, this has been something you’ve been working on for a very long time. How does it feel to have so much attention on it now after you have been saying we have these challenges for so long? 

Brad Udall: It’s bittersweet. I was one of the first guys that started talking about the risk of climate induced low flows, climate change caused low flows in the basin way back in 2003 when I started working on this issue at that other institution in Colorado of higher education. And I would give talks basically to dirty looks, people who didn’t really want to believe that humans could change the climate and those changes could really impact our way of life and our water supplies. And now I find myself basically being right on this and it’s not great, frankly. I wish I weren’t right, I’d feel a lot better about our future if we weren’t right. 

And I don’t want to be a complete pessimist here, I actually think there are really good people working on this and I do think there’s rumors of a solution right now in the lower basin, as I mentioned earlier. And people in this field, they’re good, they’re hardworking, they’re well-meaning and they want to do right by their stakeholders and I trust them. So, there’s good things going on. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Sure, absolutely. I’m relieved, of course, to hear that you feel that way. Do you think it is sinking in not only … You mentioned that you’ve been having a lot of conversations with reporters as, at least, media attention has turned a little bit more toward these issues. Do you think it is also sinking in with, say, an average resident of these seven basin states or Mexico for that matter? 

Brad Udall: Is it sinking in? Maybe by osmosis. I don’t think the average citizen completely understands how climate change is water change, something I’ve been saying for years. And in your kind introduction, you talked about these national assessments and international climate assessments I’ve worked on. And if I’ve learned anything from working on these assessments, they’re massive documents. They always have an executive summary, executive summary has 10 bolded points and point three or point four on every one of them says expect big changes in the water cycle. 

You’re going to see more rain and less snow as it warms up, you’re going to see earlier runoff, you’re going to see more intense downpours, you’re going to see more intense droughts, you’re going to see crummy water quality because water temperatures will go up. There’s a whole litany of changes that are going to occur to the water cycle in large part because the water cycle is heat driven. And if you add heat to the plant like we’re doing right now, you fundamentally change that water cycle and we’re seeing it. 

So, that part, that intellectual understanding of what’s going on here and that scientists have connected water cycle changes to climate changes for over 50 years, I don’t think the public gets that. I do think the public understands, hey, wow, this is a really long drought and it’s really hot out there and something’s going on but the more nuanced learning is not really there yet. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Do you have some thoughts on how we might, as a group of people who care about these things, help it sink in and why would it be important for the general public to really understand this issue? 

Brad Udall: In the famous words of former congressman Wayne Aspinall, the late Wayne Aspinall, if you touch water in Colorado, you touch everything. You know that quote, Jocelyn, it’s a really good quote. Water underpins everything we do here. It’s tied to our recreation, our economy, our food. And how do we get the word out? The Spur Campus is a great place to start talking about this, for sure. CSU does its job at educating students on a regular basis. Over the years I’ve been at CSU, I’ve literally given hundreds of talks around the state on this issue and, frankly, it’s more of the same. I don’t think there’s any silver bullets here, it’s just continuing to talk about what we know and connecting it with what we’re seeing on the ground. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So, as you give those talks and you mentioned feeling that the other folks who are working in this space as professionals are thoughtful and smart and hardworking that you have some hope there. What hope can we give to the general public or what tasks might you assign them to think about how they can help bring us back from the brink of where we are right now with our reservoir level so low and our precipitation so low? What can a citizen of one of our front range cities do? 

Brad Udall: All right, so we’re down 20% flows in the Colorado River basin, that water’s about half of what we have on the Front Range because our native supplies here aren’t enough. And so, we have these massive, what are called trans basin diversions, namely tunnels, believe it or not, under our mountains that transport water from the west slope to the east slope. So, what can people do? Being aware of your water usage obviously is really important, not wasting water. Half the water generally in the American West goes to outdoor irrigation of lawns and, frankly, I’m not a big fan of lawns anymore. My wife and I converted our outdoor lawn space to xeriscape now and use a lot less water. 

Trees are really important in these municipal places because they provide shade for all of us. Continuing to upgrade appliances in our homes are important, washers and dryers and toilets and shower heads and the like. Historically, you see about a 1% decrease in water use through time in most municipalities and it doesn’t sound like a lot but it actually adds up over 10 or 20 years. And the really good story in the American West is how cities have used a lot less water over the last 40 and 50 years. And that’s true in Denver and Phoenix and Las Vegas, it’s true in Los Angeles, it’s true almost everywhere. 

And a lot of it are these incremental pieces that individuals pursue that maybe get a rebate for a new toilet but it’s also been some pretty proactive programs like paying people to rip out grass in places like Las Vegas. So, there is hope out there, I think just being aware of your own water use and trying to make sure that it’s not excessive and understanding this is a numbers game and, as an engineer and scientist, understanding the numbers of your own use, pretty important. 

Jocelyn Hittle: A similar question perhaps is around agriculture and, of course, we can’t have this conversation without talking about the use of water in ag. What’s giving you hope there around how farmers and ranchers are approaching this problem for the portion of this equation that they control? 

Brad Udall: And let’s talk about how big that portion is, it’s roughly 80% of water use, it’s huge. You can’t solve this without ag. Jim Lochhead, the general manager of Denver Water, has said all the American Southwest cities could go away and you still can’t solve this problem. So, I start in by saying, “Hey, ag’s 80% of the use, it probably needs to be 80% of the solution,” and this gets really painful. A number of things have been proposed for ag and efficiency always comes up. Can you use water more efficiently? And the answer is, in some cases, yes. Efficiency is a little tricky in that sometimes newfangled devices in ag can, believe it or not, actually increase water use so you got to be careful about that. 

The fouling word is not a favorite with ag, obviously, and it really is harmful to them but you’re probably going to see some. And in the lower basin, you may have … The really valuable agriculture in the lower basin is the winter produce that they provide for the American citizenry. It’s a 365 growing day season in the lower basin and so our winter produce comes out of areas like Yuma and just across the border in Mexico and the Imperial Valley. It’s a highly valuable ag and that should stay growing, they should continue to produce that. But what gets grown in the summer when it’s 110 Fahrenheit in Yuma and the Imperial Valley is of much less value. And is there a way to not grow as much in the summer and save what could be pretty significant amounts of water without hurting too much the bottom line? 

I think you’re going to see some federal investments here. There’s been a lot of talk in the basin over the years of crop switching. Can you grow a crop that uses less water and has the same or more income? I always like to say, “Hey, crop switching, great in theory, it’s really hard for farmers to practice because you’re asking them to use new agronomic knowledge, new markets, new labor, new transportation, new facilities for harvesting food often.” So, you’re asking them basically to change their whole way of doing things and, again, probably some big time federal help here needed to see if we can find some crops that use less water in the lower basin. 

So, I do think you’re going to see some ag go out of production. And it does not make me happy to say this but, given the size of this problem, it’s probably going to happen but we need to do it in a really thoughtful and sensitive way and figure out how to get these communities back on their feet after this happens, is there a way to take a little bit of water out of a system and mostly keep everything in place, keep the economics up and not hurt ag too much. These agriculture communities, one of the things worth noting here, they’re really tied together and ag is the whole lifeblood of these communities. 

And so, if you take production out, you hurt, not just the farmer, but everybody else that lives there. The labor supply, the grocery store, the seed dealer, the tractor dealer, everybody. And if we’ve learned anything in Colorado, it’s that, if you do this, be super sensitive about it and consider all these other impacts, not just the producer him or herself. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, of course. And true in municipalities too that all of these things are connected but particularly true in smaller, more rural communities or agricultural communities that there really is a linchpin that, if you pull, there’s a lot more of a impact on the rest of the community than maybe in larger cities. So, yeah, have to be very thoughtful about these things. So, speaking of being thoughtful, can we talk a little bit about what it means to do research on policy? 

So, I think, a lot of people, if they think about someone who’s working at a university and is a researcher, they’re thinking scientific research where you do an experiment and there’s an outcome and you publish it and you move on to the next experiment that takes you one step closer to understanding whatever question you’ve originally asked. 

So, obviously, there’s a parallel within policy research but it’s a little bit different. Can you talk a little bit about what does policy scholarship look like and mean and how do you do it in a way that allows you to both advocate for specific policy outcome without maybe waiting into the politics side of it which, as an academic, maybe is not where you want to be? 

Brad Udall: Yeah. So, I’m a really unusual being in the water research space in the American West for a whole bunch of reasons that I didn’t have anything to do with. Some of them are fun but they give me an entree in places that a lot of policy folks don’t have. And I’ll just briefly mention them because I don’t know that anybody could ever reproduce my career. So, I’m the great-great-grandson of John D. Lee, the founder of Lee’s Ferry, the dividing line set forth in the Colorado River Compact between the upper basin and the lower basin. And that’s an interesting talking point which is fun but probably more importantly is that two of my forebearers, my father and my uncle, were really prominent players in western water politics in the 1960s through the 1990s in the case of my father. 

My father was a congressman from Arizona, was instrumental in passing this huge water project in Arizona that’s now part of the problem and will be part of this solution to these water delivery shortages that are going to occur. It’s called the Central Arizona Project, his name was Morris or Mo Udall and my uncle was Stewart Udall, former Secretary of the Interior under President’s Kennedy and Johnson. And both of them actually, frankly, created some of the problems we have today and both those guys are beloved in the American West and I inherit that. I had nothing to do with it and they’re now fading into history so it takes an older person to remember them. 

But for a large part of my career, people knew who they were and they had a really outstanding reputation for being good, honest people who would listen and try and come up with water solutions. So, let me just say that as a beginning place because, both of those, John D. Lee and Mo and Stewart give me just a touch of license to go into places that, otherwise, some researchers might fear to tread with good reason. And most of my work’s been more on the scientific side but it almost always has policy relevance, that’s where I’ve tried to make a difference. So, one example. 

Recently, a bunch of researchers and I published a piece in science that talked about the cuts that were needed to stabilize the Colorado River system if these low flows continue. And within those cuts, we promoted a bunch of different ideas about how you might do it. Could you cap upper basin water use? Could you put really big cuts on the lower basin? At what level do the cuts go in place? And so, this article provided somewhat of a smorgasbord of potential ways to balance the books in the Colorado River and, hence, it’s really policy relevant. 

And we put forth a number of ideas including a discussion about a really sensitive topic in the basin which is the so-called delivery obligation under the Colorado River Compact that the upper basin supposedly, and I underline supposedly, has to the lower basin. So, I’m not positive I’m answering your question here but most of my focus has been on climate change and how it’s causing these flows to decline and how we might respond to that in a way that’s policy relevant and gives decision makers something to think about. 

Two other quick comments. A lot of times, in the scientific world, man, you write these really dense articles and you’re not done when you write that dense article. Unfortunately, the denseness is needed to get it published but then you have a whole secondary job to communicate that to the world at large and that’s a whole different skillset. It’s a skillset that I like to utilize and think I’m pretty good at but that doesn’t happen. You can’t just write an article in today’s world and think people are going to read it and understand it, you got to go communicate about it. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely. And that takes me a little bit to some of the ways in which people can engage in these big problems from a variety of different backgrounds and perspectives. So, in your case, you both have done the science, the climate science, and then you do the translation to less dense, more digestible. You mentioned you’re talking to the press all the time, not every researcher is going to want to or be comfortable doing that. 

And so, there is another role to play perhaps in taking the science and making it something that can be appreciated, disseminated, understood and then acted on by the general public and that’s someone who’s a communication specialist. And really important to think about how all these pieces might fit together in the different careers that surround the work you do that help to make it impactful. 

So, maybe we can transition to talking a bit about how you got where you are. You have worn a variety of hats throughout the course of your career, trained as an engineer, have done consulting, have worked in the policy space for a number of different academic institutions. So, walk us backward a bit in time. Obviously, you come by this career path somewhat naturally, you’ve already hit on that. Tell us how that actually played out, were there are specific factors or moments that got you where you are now? 

Brad Udall: It’s pretty interesting. If you look back on it, you’d think I’d planned this all out and nothing could be further from the truth. As a kid, I liked taking things apart and putting them back together and I ended up getting an engineering degree from Stanford in environmental engineering back in 1981 when that was actually not really a degree. I put it together, delving deep into their course catalog and realizing I could do this, roll this own engineering degree up. And I actually finished high school here in Colorado, my parents were divorced, my mother was an old Colorado gal, she moved to Boulder. 

And from Boulder, I went to Stanford, got an engineering degree, came back, actually spent some time programming computers for a living just because I could see this being really important. This was around the time the first personal computers came out and it seemed like that was the skill you just wanted. I wanted to have a technical background skill, I wanted to have. I then went to work for an engineering consulting firm in Boulder and we worked on issues of the South Platte and the Snake River and the Colorado River and the Arkansas and we would get contracts from things like Colorado Water Conservation Board and the National Marine Fishery Service and the Bureau of Reclamation. 

Over a number of years, I became the managing partner at that firm and, after a while, it just felt like a 20-person firm was great but I didn’t want to spend my life there. My wife and I had always wanted to live in the mountains and I took a job, believe it or not, running a land trust in Eagle County. And the interesting tie to what I do now is that those land trusts work all the time with ranchers and farmers and producers trying to conserve land and that actually gave me at least some insights and introduction into the challenges our ranchers and farmers have because Letter land Eagle County, which is Vail, the really big cool open spaces are owned or ranches, are privately owned ranches and so we were pursuing conservation easements on these big properties. 

I then came back down to the Front Range and took a job for 10 plus years at the University of Colorado running what’s called the Western Water Assessment. This big NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, funded effort at CU called the Western Water Assessment and that’s really where I learned about climate change and a lot more about meteorology. By the time I was done at 10 years, I was the principal investigator on that and, somewhere in there, prior to moving up to Vail, I actually got an MBA from CSU, I left that out. And it was that MBA, believe it or not, that oddly got me the job at CU because I had to have this second degree, I would’ve not have been hired with just a bachelor’s. 

And so, I was there for 10 plus years, moved over to the University of Colorado Law School where I ran their environmental center there for about a year, the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Energy, Natural Resources and the Environment. And that was not a great fit, it was super interesting and it actually gave me some good insights into policy and law. It was a terrific year, it just wasn’t a great long-term fit and then I ended up at CSU. They were interested in my climate change expertise which, at that point, was pretty well-developed and that’s where I am today and it’s been quite a riot. I don’t know that anybody could duplicate that. 

If I had to do it again, I’d get a PhD in some field, more likely than not. I would make sure that that field, at least for me, was broad enough to be able to combine my interest in communication with my interest in science and the deep dives that you have to do. But that’s a short version of my life and how I got to where I am today. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So, I’d like to dig in a little on some of the transitions in particular because I think they give us a bit more insight into how it is that people’s careers develop the way that they do. Were there specific people that were instrumental in changing where you were, engineering as a starting place and then transitioning to law and business and all? Were there people that came in and said, “Hey, you really need this additional skill,” or mentors who shaped how you were thinking about your career path? 

Brad Udall: My time at the University of Colorado was really terrific because I had a number of mentors there that would guide me through what I needed to learn. And oftentimes, these were PhD folks who were super smart and I could go ask them about things that I felt like I needed to know to run this million-dollar a year research program called the Western Water Assessment. And some of them were in the big NOAA lab in Boulder, some of them were over o on campus, so professors. There’s a deep well of knowledge at the University of Colorado and water, much like it’s CSU, and some really great folks. 

Balaji Rajagopalan comes to mind at CSU, Marty Hoerling at NOAA, I’m going to offend somebody because I’d leave them out, Robin Webb. There are a whole bunch of names I can pull off, Roger Pulwarty. Just all these cool government and university scientists who really helped me along and gave me good advice. And at the law school, Charles Wilkinson, who’s really well known, the water lawyer, natural resource lawyer was just terrific to me there. And at CSU, Reagan Waskom, of course, was just really fantastic and he’s the guy who brought me on. 

So, yeah, other people really make and break your careers and help you and it’s up to you on some level to figure out how to politely ask people to help you and to give back, too. That’s the nature of all friendships, it’s not just a one way street. But mentors in my life have been super important. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Are there some specific pieces of advice that stuck with you that you remember from those folks? I’m putting you on the spot a little bit. 

Brad Udall: Yeah, yeah. Surprisingly, at the Western Water Assessment where I gained a lot of my knowledge on water and climate, I also gained a lot of knowledge about working with decision makers because that program that I ran was one of about 10 similar programs around the country, each one focused on three or four states. Western Water Assessment had Wyoming and Utah and Colorado. And I had people really help me understand how to interact with decision makers and how to engage with them and make science relevant and query them in a way that made your research all the better. 

And, I will say, there’s a nice dovetail there with my family history too. I grew up with a guy who served in Congress for 30 years and politicians know how to ask, if they’re good, they know how to ask people for what they need and how they want it and how to listen. And so, my father, on some level, was pretty helpful in this regard too as well as just my general family dynamics of growing up in this political family where you intuitively understand how things get done in the policy realm. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Sure, and also understand the power of being able to communicate. 

Brad Udall: Yeah. In fact, interestingly, I never thought I was a particularly good communicator until somewhere it happened at the University of Colorado. I think I just got thrown into having to communicate and it’s always been a skill that so many people in my family are really good at, I always thought I was crummy at it. I had a brother who was just outstanding and, my father, he’s written books, basically, on how to communicate. I always just thought I was illiterate and tongue-tied and inadequate in the overall scheme of things and I learned how to do it and ultimately surprised myself. 

And if I had any advice to college kids nowadays, I was this nerd engineering student in undergraduate doing worksheets and problem sets and would occasionally write a paper. And it turned out, the skills that I didn’t get a chance to focus on, the writing and the speaking, became enormously important later in life. And I kind of wish, in college, I’d had a chance somehow to utilize those and to burnish them and it was only later that I figured out I was actually pretty good at it. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, that’s interesting and you beat me to a question that I was going to ask around what advice you would give to young people, so to your college age self. Some of that advice might be to focus a bit more on the communications. What about even younger? What about your high school self, 15-year-old? 

Brad Udall: I bet you, even nowadays, communication is far more important in high school than it ever was when I was there. The ability to talk, it’s really important and to talk in complete sentences and to have to think things through ahead of time. This communication skill, you have to work at it. Originally, and I still do, when I give presentations, I don’t just slap something together and give it, there’s a lot of thought that goes into these. 

And unfortunately, a lot of times, it’s midnight oil to figure out how to give a talk that flows logically, that makes people think, that makes them laugh occasionally because then they’ll pay attention if you’ve got them laughing, that challenges their assumptions, that presents stuff in a way that’s pretty easy to digest and then recapping it all at the end. None of this stuff is rocket science but it takes preparation and practice to get it right. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, that reminds me or brings to mind the work that we did with Gary Knell, the CEO and chairman of National Geographic, when he was our keynote at the Water and the West Symposium a few years ago with the idea that we were bringing in someone who could talk about storytelling, which might be outside of the water sector per se, but a very important component to doing work in water, yes, but in general. And I found his comments on what makes an effective storyteller and an effective story really compelling and a set of skills that all of us could cultivate to help us get done what we want to get done, regardless of what your base discipline is. 

Brad Udall: Yeah, and it’s really important to remember always that people remember stories. They rarely remember numbers but they’ll remember a story. This is the humanity in all of us and how history gets passed on. It gets passed on in stories that make sense, that flow logically and maybe have an edge to them or something quite memorable. It’s not 15 million acre feet, people don’t remember 15 million acre feet. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So, I just have a few last questions for you. One is is there a place where you would direct people to find out more information, either about your work or about the Colorado River or about water in the west in general? 

Brad Udall: Well, I recently built a website with a number of colleagues called coloradoriverscience.org. It’s a Wiki based website that has all kinds of information on the Colorado River and it’s a little wonky but it’s a good place if you’re interested in different facts on the river. Of course, the Colorado Water Center and all the folks that are there, John Tracy and Nancy Grice are terrific and it’s their job to help people get engaged in water at CSU. Those are at least a couple of different places. I always make myself available, if people want to come directly at me, I’m happy to talk, email, whatever works. 

Jocelyn Hittle: And you’re very generous with your time in that way and your expertise, I appreciate it, I know others do as well. So, the last question I have for you is our Spur of the Moment question so it’s apropos of absolutely nothing. Are you a music lover? And if you were going to have to pick one genre to listen to only, what would it be? 

Brad Udall: Oh, interesting. 

Jocelyn Hittle: I don’t feel it’s fair to ever ask people to just pick a favorite album or if they could only listen to one album but, maybe a genre, a genre might be doable. 

Brad Udall: I’ll tell you a secret that nobody knows. The course I struggled the most with at Stanford as part of my distribution requirements was an appreciation of music course. And I barely got out of there with a passing grade which is not true of any of the other courses I took. 

Jocelyn Hittle: I’m sure not. I have stumbled upon your Achilles heel, I apologize. 

Brad Udall: So, the one thing that course did for me was appreciate classical music and I don’t listen to nearly enough of it but I find it really enjoyable. And we listened to just some classic … I was taught to appreciate stuff that anybody knows music just will laugh at, Bach and Beethoven amongst others. I like all different kinds of music and it’s mostly rock and pop nowadays and a lot of ’70s era stuff, ’80s era stuff. There’s rarely a piece of music that I don’t like, let me say that. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. 

Brad Udall: And you- 

Jocelyn Hittle: Fair enough. 

Brad Udall: Yeah. 

Jocelyn Hittle: We can leave it there if you want, yeah. 

Brad Udall: All right, yeah. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Well, thank you very much. And thank you very much, Brad, for your time today, really appreciate this conversation. We could keep talking, I know, for a long time about all of these, all of the work that you’re doing both on the scientific side and also on the communication side. But we are absolutely thrilled and honored to have you both at CSU and as a guest here on Spur of the Moment so really appreciate it. 

Brad Udall: Thank you, Jocelyn. 

Jocelyn Hittle: The CSU Spur of the Moment Podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson and our theme music is by Ketsa. Please visit the show notes for links mentioned in this episode. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.